Robert Wright's book Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destiny claims to unearth
the arrow of history, the direction in which life
has been moving these past few dozen thousand years.
That direction is (drumroll ...) greater complexity,
specifically the greater complexity that allows
humans--and microbes, for that matter--to realize
the fruit of "non-zero-sum" cooperation. In a
sweeping and surprisingly entertaining narrative,
Wright traces this trajectory from the most
primitive bacterium to hunter-gatherer tribes
to the current threshold at which we stand:
the beginning of the age of planetary government.

The overall effect is a bit like the
famous Alfred Hitchcock anecdote in which
a minor actor makes a fuss over his lines,
at which point the great director calls a
break and ushers the recalcitrant thespian
into his office. There, on the wall, is a
giant outline of the entire movie, scene by
scene, with different-colored lines depicting
the various characters. Hitchcock points to
a small, short line about two-thirds of the
way down. "See that?" he asks. "That's you.
Don't give me any s---."

I happen to find Wright's grand view
very convincing. I will from now on try
not to futilely stand in the way of the
inevitable march of human complexity and
cooperation. But none of the many reviewers
of Nonzero has mentioned one specific reason
why Wright's view of history seems so congenial,
which is that it echoes the view I was taught
(and insisted on being taught) when I
attended college in the late '60s. Wright,
to be blunt, is a Marxist.

Or at least his idea of how history works
seems pretty much the Marxist idea,
otherwise known as "dialectical materialism."
My sandal-wearing comrades in SDS were right
all along! I knew it. Consider the following
characteristics of Nonzero's version of human history:

It's dialectical! Wright denounces what
he calls the "equilibrium fallacy," the
notion that human society is stable until
some external shock comes along to change
it. History is always unfolding, as mankind
learns to realize new non-zero-sum gains--inventing
agriculture, pursuing a division of labor, inventing
money, writing, the printing press, etc. These
developments are ultimately driven, Wright argues,
by "internal and intrinsic forces such as social striving and
population growth." In the process of pursuing these goals,
societies create "the seeds of their destruction." The
resulting change is not typically a slow accretion of
incremental improvements but often a sudden eruption,
"radically" altering society in a way that produces a
qualitative change, a new level of "social complexity,"
which in turn sows the seeds of its destruction, etc.
In other words: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

It's materialist! In Wright's model,
then, social change isn't produced by ideas
about a better or more just world. The revolution
is not a dinner party! Social change is produced by
developments in technology that "permit or
encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum
interaction," which seems a lot like what Marx would
call the "forces of production." Take the transition
from feudalism to capitalism:

Basically, a low-tech means of realizing
positive sums--feudalism, geared to an age
of little money, sparse literacy, and broken
down roads--gave way to a high-tech means,
radically changing the power structure.

Wright's technological determinism is
softened by the crucial realization that
social organization is itself a
"technology"--an agricultural chiefdom
has a more complex, productive division of
labor than a hunter-gatherer band, quite apart
from whether it has better tools. Individual
liberty ("bourgeois freedom") in the polity
and market is, in this sense, a very "efficient
technology," which is why it wins out.

It says there are inevitable,
scientific laws of history. Marxists
claimed to have discovered such laws,
for which they've endured a century
and a half of ridicule. But Wright makes
a similar claim. The triumph of bourgeois
society is, in his view, just one instance
of a process of cultural evolution that
parallels Darwin's natural selection.
Some societies (those better at realizing
the fruits of "non-zero-sum cooperation")
beat out other societies, and are in turn
beaten out by more complex, non-zero-sum-realizing
social systems. As a result, history has an almost
inevitable progression. Chiefdoms beat
hunter-gatherers. States beat chiefdoms.
Capitalism beats feudalism. The path, if
not completely fixed, is pretty clear.
You don't see feudalism following capitalism,
over any sort of long run. You don't see any
society saying, "Stop the march to complexity,
I want to get off," and surviving for long in
the cultural-evolutionary race. (A society that
does this will eventually get conquered, or
crowded out, or it will convert.) Barring
some sort of planetary extinction, global
capitalism, verging on world government,
is where humans were destined to end up at
some point, which happens to be now. The
Marxists were wrong only in predicting two
further transformations--into socialism,
and then communism--that weren't in the
cards. So they got a few details wrong.

Religion and culture are often
reduced to epiphenomena. Marxists,
especially the crude, hard-core
variety, talk about "substructure"
and "superstructure." The substructure
is the economic "mode of
production"--feudalism, capitalism,
whatever. In the "superstructure"
are the other institutions of that
culture--religions, music, associations, political institutions, family structures, tastes--that have to
either fit in with the substructure, or
else. Substitute "technological means
of realizing positive sums" for
"mode of production," and you have
Wright's view, too.

This may seem like common
sense, but in either its
Marxist or Wrightist form,
the substructure/superstructure
notion has real bite. Three examples
illustrate this point:

1. China: Many people, not least the current rulers of
China and some of their American anti-MFN opponents,
believe the Chinese can in effect harness modern
positive-sum-generating technology while preserving
communist political institutions. Wrong, says Wright.
A capitalist substructure will generate a bourgeois
superstructure.

2. Religions: If a religion clashes
with the productive needs of a given
"state of development in the productive
facilities of man" (that's Marx), can the
religion survive? Many people, especially
ecumenical sorts who believe in the power
of faith and ideas, would say yes. A
good Marxist--and Wright--would say no.
It may be true, as Wright argues, that
"one key to Islam's potency" was that it
made a "larger world safe for commerce."
But if, in dialectical fashion, it comes
to stand in the way of global productive
advance (i.e., competitiveness), Islam
as we know it will eventually disappear.

3. Welfare reform: Jason DeParle of the
New York Times reports that the 1996
welfare law succeeded in getting lots
of people off the dole and into jobs.
But, he argues, this "may end up making
less of a difference in the lives of the
poor, socially or economically, than much
of the public imagined." Many fathers are still
absent, boyfriends still beat up their girlfriends,
drug problems persist, etc. A good Marxist/Wrightian
would say DeParle's thesis is crazy--if you change
the economic substructure or "mode of production"
of inner city life (from being on welfare to
being in the labor force), all the other
institutions in the lives of the poor
will have to change in turn. Women
who now have to work will begin to
look for men who can help support
them, for example. If the poor
neighborhoods DeParle looks at
still have a lot of absent
fathers--well, come back
in 10 years and things will look different.

I'm not saying Wright is slyly repackaging
Marxist ideas for public consumption.
Wright acknowledges the similarities
between his view and Marx's. And Wright's
view is different in important respects. For
one, it grounds history in a more realistic,
darker, Darwinian view of human nature, with
its status-seeking and back-stabbing--none of
that mushy Marxian talk about man's inherent,
social "species being." Nor is it clear that
in Wright's view the disruption produced by the
pursuit of non-zero-sum gains always takes the
form of conflict between "classes," as opposed
to, say, war between nations (although
it often does). And there's that business
about communism.

Wright's idea--and I know this would sound
incredibly presumptuous to my old grad-student
teachers, as it may sound to you--is larger than
Marx's. Marx nailed the transition from feudalism
to capitalism, but if you read Pre-Capitalist
Economic Formations you'll realize he had
trouble extending the thesis/antithesis/synthesis
model back to before feudalism. Marx winds up
relying on the imperatives of population growth.
But Wright adds to this the inherent Darwinian
drive for status, which explains a whole lot
more. Wright's dynamic extends back from feudalism
to the primordial soup, and ahead, from the
Industrial Revolution to ... well, there
is talk of the "noosphere," or global mind,
which may be the Internet, the
"electronically mediated web of
thought that had taken crystalline
form by the end of the second millennium."

In this sense, Wright is not a
Marxist; Marx is a Wrightist. Wright
provides an overarching framework that
Marx's thinking on the feudalism/capitalism
transition plugs neatly into. Still, it's
nice to know that Marxist history is being
rehabilitated in respectable bourgeois circles.
I didn't waste my youth after all.

Conflict disclosure: Wright is a
friend--actually a close friend. You
will have to take my word that I wouldn't
have written this unless I really was
persuaded by Nonzero--at least by the
first nine tenths, before it enters a cosmic-speculation
mode. I've occasionally cleared rooms by declaring
that Wright's previous book on evolutionary psychology
and human nature,
The Moral Animal, explains everything.
Nonzero explains everything else. ... You should also know that if
you click on these book links (or any others) and go to Amazon.com from my site, and
actually purchase them, I get 5 percent. So far I have made $92.65
this way. But the night is young. ...

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